Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Lagavulin 16 year

stats: Single Malt Scotch, Islay,
43%, $70

It’s a tale that is often recounted in Scotch Whisky lore;
that of replacement stills being exact copies of the originals, right down to
having the dents faithfully replicated. I’m very doubtful of the aforementioned
being a common occurrence and repetition of this dubious narrative only helps
to propagate the fanciful notion that single malts are an unchanging commodity.

Many factors are at play when it comes to the evolving
flavor profiles of single malts. I’m going to explore several of them in my
next post, but today I’d like to focus solely on the stills.

It does make sense to try to keep the stills’
characteristics a constant, and perhaps over the last century there’s been a
distillery manager or two who were lacking in self-confidence to the point of
requesting that the coppersmiths recreate random indentations. But surely I
could also find an example or two of stills that had been replaced with ones of
a dissimilar design.

Once again, I’ve led myself down the path of excessive
whisky research.

I started with Talisker, remembering that they had switched
over from triple distillation to double distillation in 1928. That alone is a
pretty radical shift, a simultaneous change of the stills would be logical. But
I soon discovered that this was not the case. Two new stills were added to the
original three some time between 1885 and 1928 (I’m assuming a second wash
still and a second intermediate still, with the original spirit still running double
duty). When they switched to double distillation, they just started running the
two intermediate stills as spirit stills (I believe they were identical in size
and shape to the original spirit still), giving the current setup of three
spirit stills and two wash stills. The still house was destroyed by fire in
1960 when spirit boiled over onto the burning coals below. It took two years to
rebuild, but the five brand new stills were faithful reproductions of the ones
that had been lost.

Caol Ila was my next suspect: when I was researching my
recent post on that distillery I came across the fact that many connoisseurs
find a clear distinction between the whisky made there before and after the
distillery was completely rebuilt in the early 1970’s. I suspected that the
stills had become much larger to increase capacity at that time. But here too
my guesswork came up short. It turns out that in spite of changing nearly every
other aspect of the distilling process after the rebuild, the six new stills
were exact replicas of the original two that had been decommissioned.

With a little further digging I finally came across something
that sounded promising with Tobermory. Records dating to 1885 show that the
distillery had two stills, the wash still with a capacity of 11,500 liters and
the spirit still at 7770 liters. The four current stills date to 1972 and have
capacities of 18,000 liters and 15,000 liters. Not only were the new stills
much bigger, the they had gone from a wash still that was almost 50% bigger
than the spirit still a wash still that was 20% bigger than the spirit still. That
difference would definitely have an effect on the spirit, but as I read on I
learned that the distillery was closed from 1930 to 1972 and stripped of most
of its equipment during that time. With a gap of 42 years between the old and
new design of the stills, I don’t think this is quite the evidence I was after.

Then I found what I was looking for at Oban. After a four
year closure, from 1968 to 1972, the still house was rebuilt and the two
original stills (with capacities of 4544 liters and 2272 liters) were replaced
by two much larger stills (19,000 liters and 8000 liters). I believe this was
done because they desperately needed to increase capacity and had no room to
expand (steep cliffs rise right behind the property and a crowded city had
grown around the distillery). It looks like they used the space available as
effectively as possible by quadrupling the size of the stills instead of
replacing the original two with eight copies, which simply would not have fit.

And now on to the example that I sort of knew about all
along: Lagavulin. When I toured the distillery last year I noticed some
historic photos hanging on the wall of a hallway in the visitor center. There
were a few images of the stills dated to 1905, and they looked quite different
than the current pots. Technical information about the equipment a distillery
has used through its lifetime isn’t typically available in abundance, but after
scouring through many sources I was able to come up with enough to paint an
interesting picture of how Lagavulin’s stills have evolved over the last few
centuries.

First, there’s an interesting little story which must be
told, as it is integral to what I’m about to discuss. Laphroaig, which is
located just a mile down the road from Lagavulin was a fairly small operation
at the start of the 20th century. As such, they had contracted
Lagavulin to act as their sales agent. This was a lucrative concern for
Lagavulin, so it is understandable that the owner, Peter Mackie, was upset when
Laphroaig decided to handle their own sales in 1907 and had a court dissolve
their agreement. First Mackie had a dam built which interrupted Laphroaig’s
water supply. The courts soon ordered him to restore the waterway. After a few
failed attempts to takeover Laphroaig, Mackie decided to copy their whisky in
an attempt to drive them out of business.

In 1908 he built a distillery named Malt Mill in a few of
the older buildings of the Lagavulin complex. He commissioned replicas of the
Laphroaig stills, and even hired away some of their staff. As well as the
equipment and processes had been copied, the whisky just wasn’t the same,
possibly owing to the fact that the distilleries had different water sources. Laphroaig thrived and grew, and
surprisingly Malt Mill continued to make whisky for more than 50 years.

Back to the stills of Lagavulin, in the 1820’s the wash
still was 372 liters and the spirit still was 114 liters. That is tiny in
comparison to any modern distillery. By 1887 they had grown to 5450 liters and
2950 liters.

We know that the wash still was replaced in 1892, because
there is a record of the old one being sold to the new Balvenie Distillery. I
couldn’t find any information about the size of the new still, but I can’t see
why they would have gotten rid of a still that was in good enough condition to be
used in another distillery unless they were replacing it with a bigger one. If
that was the case, I’d imagine the spirit still would have been upsized at the
same time.

The next record of a change that I could find was from 1962.
This was when the Malt Mill Distillery closed, and at the same time a new, larger
still house was built at Lagavulin. The two Malt Mill stills were moved there,
joining the two Lagavulin stills. At that time the Lagavulin stills were
reported to have capacities of 10442 liters (wash) and 6583 liters (spirit).
The Malt Mill stills were said to have been much smaller than Lagavulin’s, but
I’m unsure of the date of that statement. We do know that Malt Mill only
produced 1/5 as much whisky as Lagavulin in 1908.

The next big change happened in 1969. The information that I
found is written in a way that is a bit convoluted, but my interpretation of
what I read was that all four stills were decommissioned and four new stills
were installed at this time. Two wash stills at 10,500 liters capacity each
were made to resemble the recently removed Lagavulin stills which were onion
shaped, and two spirit stills at 8000 liters capacity were made to resemble the
old Malt Mill stills which were pear shaped. This is backed up by the statement
on Lagavulin’s web site that two of the current stills are “pear shaped in the
style inherited from Malt Mill”.

Next, I started to scrutinize the images I had taken of the
two historical pictures of Lagavulin’s stills, mostly trying to see how they
differed from the current ones. And that was when I made a rather shocking
discovery; the stills in the two pictures are not the same. It wasn’t obvious
right off because one photo looks at them straight on and from above, while the
other looks at them from below and off to the right. The sizes look different,
but it’s hard to tell as only one picture includes people, providing some sort
of scale. The pots in the vertical picture have a more angular design, and the
ones in the horizontal picture have a more curved profile. Also, rivet patterns
don’t match up, and the pipes and other fittings connected to them look
different as well.

My first thought was that maybe one of the pictures was
misdated and shows the pre 1892 stills. Eastman’s Kodak camera, the first to
use film, had been around since 1888, so this would possible, at least from a
photographic standpoint. But after further consideration, I think a more likely
scenario is that both photos are misdated; if they are from 1908 rather than
1905, then one picture could be of the Lagavulin stills and the other of the
Malt Mill stills. This certainly makes sense when you compare them to a recent
still house picture. Two of the stills have a shape similar to the current wash
stills and the other two have a shape similar to the current spirit stills.

The pot stills employed by Lagavulin have changed (both in
size and shape) far more over the lifetime of the distillery than I had
anticipated. There are records of Lagavulin being bottled as a single malt as
far back as the 1880’s (it was an 8 year old in those days). Surely, the whisky
has evolved right along with the stills from which it emanates.

All of that research has left me in need of a drink; I think
a sample of the current incarnation of this iconic single malt is in order.

The color is a dark brownish-amber, hinting at a strong
sherry cask influence.The nose is full and peaty, but not overpowering. Baked
fruit and coastal notes are also at play, but overall the aromas are earthy and
dry.

The body is thick and viscous, and on the palate it almost
seems docile up front with roasted nuts, leather and cinnamon dusted baked
apples keeping the smoky elements in check. But the peat keeps coming in waves,
making repetitious sustained attacks and building in intensity as the other
flavors diminish. After singing its solo, the peat finally relents and
eventually fades, well into the incredibly long, dry finish while a subtle
floral note adds complexity.The whisky somehow manages to be robust and elegant at the
same time.

I imagine that the 8 year old from 125 years ago would have
been vastly different, yet unmistakably Lagavulin.